The first largely anticipated film of this year is definitely "Wuthering Heights" which has had a big publicity campaign that started in September 2025. This big publicity has been fitting since the film itself is also big. It features big settings, big emotions, big costumes, and big music. It runs for two hours and 16 minutes and features the big Hollywood names Margot Robbie ("Barbie," 2023) and Jacob Elordi ("Frankenstein," 2025). Such big things in "Wuthering Heights" should guarantee its cinematic greatness. Right? Well…let’s not get carried away.
Emily Bronte’s only novel was first published in 1847 and has continually remained popular in the movie world. Over 15 adaptations of the novel have been made since 1920, including feature films, foreign language films, TV films, and TV miniseries. The most popular of these film adaptations is probably the black and white version from 1939 directed by William Wyler starring Lawrence Olivier and Merle Oberon.
So this new adaptation has well-worn, established shoes to fill. And I have to be honest. I didn’t hate this film….but I didn’t love it either. I walked out of the movie theater feeling mildly satisfied. I wasn’t crying like some others, but I wasn’t rolling my eyes in disgust.
"Wuthering Height" is the story of a young girl and boy, Cathy and Heathcliff, who grow up together in the 19th century on the remote windy landscape of the English countryside. She’s a comfortable upper-class daughter with a room of her own while he’s an adopted orphan working in the stable and sleeping in the barn. Their relationship unfolds from an innocent budding romance to a whirlwind of abandonment, betrayal, and desire. These two passionate people feel destined to be together, but their impulsiveness and jealousies end up tearing them apart driving one of them toward death.
I’ve never read the book this film comes from. I know very little about how the characters and story are presented in the novel. But this film’s similarity to its source material does not determine its greatness (like any film adapted from literature). This version of "Wuthering Heights" gets very creatively flexible dressing Margot Robbie in enormous, vibrant dresses, showing multiple montages with the charged energy of a music video, and playing ominous ballads by Charlie XCX. Retelling this story through a partly contemporary lens makes this film similar to the 1996 version of "Romeo + Juliet" directed by Baz Luhrmann or the 2006 "Marie Antoinette" directed by Sofia Coppola.
Along with this contemporary flair, "Wuthering Heights" has a boldly physical, tactual, and kinky vibe. There’s rain-soaked faces, gooey egg yolks, squishy bread dough, and tightened horse bridles. It’s so sexually charged, with such serious confessions of love, I started feeling it leaning into soap opera territory. The over-the-top set design and costumes don’t exactly help this film either.
One room has walls covered in chunks of crystal softly reflecting light in different geometric shapes. Another room is painted top to bottom in a reflective, metallic silver. Margot Robbie wears necklaces of jewels the size of my fist. (Other heavily decorative choices abound in almost all the interior settings.) So many of these opulent design choices (and choices in the cinematography) overshadow the acting and plot points, forcing the film into fairy tale territory or nursery rhyme territory.
A few times during this film I thought to myself, "The women working on the design and visual effects of this film must have been obsessed with Lisa Frank products as a child." It seems director and screenwriter Emerald Fennell ("Saltburn", 2023) prioritized fantastical atmosphere over believable emotion.
Unlike some people, I would not describe "Wuthering Heights" as a forbidden romance. It’s more like a Victorian tragedy showing the destructive consequences of toxic codependence. Cathy and Heathcliff definitely show an animal-like attraction for each other. But so much of their selfish, manipulative behavior hurts the other so deeply, that "romance" is not the name in this love game.
I feel this film is adequately okay. It is not a conventional period drama, but it’s also not a smoothly organized one (or a carefully designed one) either.
